Roni Horn: Wits’ End

Horn’s silkscreens of crowdsourced cliches and colloquialisms celebrate the instabilities of the vernacular

In the two series of drawings that comprise Wits’ End, Roni Horn (born 1955) takes handwritten idioms, cliches and colloquialisms as her source material. Horn asked approximately 300 people to write down five of these vernacular phrases, which were then made into individual silkscreens. In Wits’ End Sampler (2018), shown at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas, in 2018-19, the idioms are screened in a unique configuration directly on the wall; Wits End Mash (2019) consists of compositions of 75 to 350 idioms silkscreened on paper.

These drawings engage the moments when language fails and connotation migrates, with meaning that delights in instability and movement, as Michelle White writes in her essay included in this volume.

Wits’ End is the seventh in a series of books by Horn gathering series of works, two of which–bird (2008) and aka (2010)–were published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers.